Shaggycoat: The Biography of a Beaver

by Clarence Hawkes

For the first two feet, the dam would be built three tiers wide. This would make the thickness at the base about ten feet. The cracks between the logs were plastered up with sods and mud or if it seemed to call for more weight stones were occasionally used.

Soon the logs and drift-wood began to come down faster than the three at the dam could handle it for it must be laid nicely, and often one stick was placed in several positions before it suited. It would never do to have any of this building material go down-stream so two or three of the cutting gang were shifted to the dam, and the work went on.

Whenever the logs in the stream grew scarce, some of the workers at the dam went back to cutting logs. When the logs in the current jammed, river-men were quickly hurried to loosen them. There was one accident that marred the pleasure of dam-building and made the day memorable in the colony. This did not stop the work, for these things happen in the woods and the waters, where they get used to the unexpected.

One of Shaggycoat's first litter, who was now a sturdy beaver of three summers, was felling a poplar larger than most of the trees which they were using.

He was a famous wood-cutter, and wanted to distinguish himself by cutting a large tree. He had worked away all night, and when the others stopped at daylight his tree was not yet down so he stayed to finish it, but, as the morning hours went by and he did not return to the lodge, Shaggycoat went in search of him.

He found him lying at the stump of the fallen tree with his skull crushed. He had evidently tried to take one more bite at the tottering tree, when a prudent beaver would have stopped, and his head had been crushed between the stump and the falling trunk.

This is an accident that sometimes occurs, although as a whole these little wood-cutters are very cautious.

There was nothing to do in this case but leave the unfortunate victim where he had fallen, but the tree was never used.

When the dam was two feet high, it was narrowed to two tiers of logs. Then they could get on faster, but the higher it went, the longer it had to be carried out at the ends. As the water set back it was much easier to float the logs down.

The three tiers of logs at the bottom of the dam were occasionally tied together by putting on a log ten feet long that would lie across all three tiers. The cutting and placing of such a stick would take the combined strength of four or five beavers.